Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews 135 (2021) 110415

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Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews

journal homepage: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/rser

Research on quantitative assessment of climate change risk at an urban

scale: Review of recent progress and outlook of future direction
Bin Ye a, Jingjing Jiang b, *, Junguo Liu a, Yi Zheng a, Nan Zhou c
a
School of Environmental Science & Engineering, Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, 518055, China
b
School of Economics and Management, Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen), Shenzhen, 518055, China
c
Energy Analysis and Environmental Impacts Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA, 94720, USA

A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T

Keywords: Cities are not only major contributors to global climate change but also stand at the forefront of climate change
Climate change risk impact. Quantifying and assessing the risk potentially induced by climate change has great significance for cities
City to undertake positive climate adaptation and risk prevention. However, most of the previous studies focus on
Quantitative assessment
global, national or regional dimensions, only a few have attempted to examine climate change risk at an urban
Microclimate
Climate change vulnerability
scale and even less in the case of a recent literature review. As a result, a quantitative assessment of climate
change risk for cities remains highly challenging. To fill this gap, the article makes a critical review of the recent
literature on urban-scale climate change risk assessment, and classifies them into four major categories of studies
which jointly constitute a stepwise modelling chain from global climate change towards urban-scale risk
assessment. On this basis, the study summarizes the updated research progresses and discusses the major chal­
lenges to be overcome for the seamless coupling of climate simulation between different scales, the reproduction
of compound climate events, the incorporation of non-market and long-lasting impacts and the representation of
risk transmission insides or beyond a city. Furthermore, future directions to advance quantitative assessment of
urban-scale climate change risk are highlighted, with fresh insights into improving study methodology, enriching
knowledge of climate change impact on city, enhancing abundance and accessibility to data, and exploring the
best practice to provide city-specific climate risk service.

1. Introduction
Cities emerge as a powerhouse for production, consumption and
trade and have currently accommodated 54% of the global population
and gathered 80% of the global wealth [1]. However, acting as a foil to
the socioeconomic center, cities have become the hotspot for energy
consumption and the largest emitter of greenhouse gases (GHGs) around
the world. Currently, they account for two-thirds of global energy con­
sumption and are responsible for as high as 70% of global anthropogenic
GHG emissions. What’s more, with highly concentrated inhabitants,
wealth and infrastructures, cities are also one of the primary victims of
climate change which can be largely ascribed to energy consumption
from themselves. As presented by Fig. 1, cities are confronted with
fast-emerging climate disasters [2,3]. A great majority of cities with
millions of populations, particularly the megacities, are located at
low-lying coastal regions [4,5], being highly exposed to threats of rising
sea level and more frequent storm surge and flood (Fig. 1a). More
specifically, over 2000 climate disasters that attacked cities have been
reported in 2016. More than 70% of cities surveyed have suffered at
least one type of extremely serious or serious climate disasters (Fig. 1b),
with the attacks of extreme climate and weather events happening the
most frequently (Fig. 1c) and the sectors of residential health and living,
resource and agriculture, and transportation and energy infrastructure
being affected the most (Fig. 1d). Moreover, looking forward to the
future, all of the expansion of urbanization, the growth of urban energy
demand, and the far-reaching impact of climate change are unequivocal
trends [6,7], implying an increasing exposure of cities to climate change.
Judging these, cities bear the brunt of climate change risks both now and
into the future.
Given the increasingly significant impacts from climate change,
many cities have expanded their efforts from decreasing fossil energy
consumption and GHG emissions towards developing climate change
adaptation [8]. Quantifying and assessing climate change risk has
valuable significances for a city to understand the potential benefit of

* Corresponding author.
E-mail address: jiangjingjing@hit.edu.cn (J. Jiang).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rser.2020.110415
Received 29 February 2020; Received in revised form 16 May 2020; Accepted 21 September 2020
Available online 28 September 2020
1364-0321/© 2020 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
B. Ye et al.
climate change adaptation and thereby take pro-active adaptive action
[9,10]. While the important implication of climate change risk has been
increasingly recognized, most of studies focus on global, national or
regional dimensions, but only a few have attempted to examine climate
change risk at an urban scale and even less in the case of a recent
literature review [11–13]. Consequently, quantitative approaches and
their applications on urban-scale climate change risk assessment still fall
short in many aspects.
First, the guideline about the stepwise procedure and method se­
lection from global climate change to urban-scale risk assessment re­
mains very limited [14,15]. The impact of climate change on each city
depends on the specific change in local climate this city experiences
coupled with the way it is exposed and responds to, calling for more
city-oriented practical guidance on climate change risk assessment.
Second, the integrated framework of climate change risk assessment for
city is hardly to meet practical needs. Current researches mostly focus on
urban direct risk from one specific type of climate hazard, such as the
casualty and direct economic loss from flood [16]. However, climate
change can increase the occurrence of multiple climate hazards and can
affect many aspects of a city via either direct or indirect channels [17,
18], for instance the increasing outbreak of compound climate events
increase both system instability and maintenance cost of urban energy
system, and such impacts may trigger the secondary risk to other sys­
tems that energy system serves [19,20]. Third, there remain large gaps
between city science and climate science. The development and
behavior of a city itself also interact with climate change. For instance,
the transformation from fossil to renewable energies will not only
mitigate urban GHG emissions and climate change, but also alter energy
system vulnerability to climate change [19]. It is thus an urgent need to
bridge climate and city sciences and facilitate interdisciplinary model­
ling of the interactions between urban socioeconomic development and
climate change [21]. On the whole, given the far-reaching impacts of
climate change on a city and the complex interactions in nearly each
step of relevant analysis, making a quantitative assessment of
urban-scale climate change risk remains a severe challenge and awaits
further study [14,22].
Fig. 1. Climate change risks to cities. (a) Global pattern of urbanization extracted from the World Cities Report 2016, (b) the number of cities at different types and
degrees of climate change risk, (c) the number of top climate hazards affecting cities, and (d) the number of top urban sectors exposed to climate hazards. (b)–(d) are
derived from raw data in city climate hazard survey, Carbon Disclosure Project.
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Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews 135 (2021) 110415
Judging from these, the article makes a critical literature review of
recent studies on urban-scale climate change risk assessment. It attempts
to contribute to the current literature from three aspects of: sorting out a
stepwise modelling chain and four key components that move from
global-scale climate change to urban-scale risk assessment, which pro­
vides the practical guidance to assess climate change risk of city;
combing the major methods, models and practices related with urban-
scale assessment of climate change risk, which offers a clear perspec­
tive on recent progresses and major challenges in current literature; and
giving insights into several directions in urgent need of further research.
To make these contributions, the paper is composed by two major parts.
Sections 2-5 represent the first part of this article which makes a
critical literature review of recent researches. Using the search terms of
climate change simulation, urban microclimate, climate change
vulnerability, urban climate change risk, and climate risk assessment,
the paper retrieves relevant documents from Web of Science database and
focuses on those published during 2010–2020. After the literature
collection, the article makes a preliminary examination of collected
documents based on abstracts, keywords and major findings; and a total
of 180 high-quality articles are screened out and used for more detailed
literature analysis, refining, synthesis and commentary. Moreover, the
review analysis finds that although being discussed from various as­
pects, the current literature can be basically classified into four major
categories of research which jointly constitute a stepwise modelling
chain [23–26]. More specifically, Section 2 reviews the recent studies on
the downscaling of large-scale climate change to a local scale, which
represent the first category of research. Section 3 moves to the second
category of study which simulate future urban development and couple
regional and local climate forcing to project the urban microclimate.
Based on the above analysis of urban socioeconomic development and
microclimate change, Section 4 proceeds to the third category of study
which assess urban climate change vulnerability. Following this chain,
Section 5 further introduces uncertainties and summarizes recent
studies on the integrated assessment of climate change risk for city,
which detail the fourth category of research. Overall, these four sections
specify the up-to-date progresses and major challenges in current
B. Ye et al.
literature on urban-scale climate change risk assessment. On this
ground, Section 6 presents the second part of the article that advocates
to advance future research from four important directions of: improving
study methodology, enriching knowledge of climate change impact on
future city, enhancing abundance and accessibility to data, and
exploring the best practice for city-specific climate risk service. The
overall framework of this article is illustrated by Fig. 2.
2. Research on downscaling of large-scale climate change to a
local scale
Climate change risk of each city depend on the specific change in
local climate the city is exposed to. Hence, downscaling of large-scale
climate change to a local scale is the prerequisite and first-step work
to assess climate change risk for a city. This section will make a critical
review of how climate change simulation can be downscaled from global
and regional scales towards a local scale and discuss the major pro­
gresses and challenges in the current literature.
2.1. Statistical and dynamical downscaling
The general circulation models (GCMs) are one of the most advanced
instruments to simulate the response of future climate system to
increasing GHG concentrations at global and continental scales, but they
are shortage of confidence in mesoscale and local details [12,27,28].
The resolution of GCMs is typically as large as hundreds or dozens of
kilometers, which are too coarse to be applied for detecting the possible
changes in climate conditions or climate hazards for a city. This limi­
tation is particularly prominent in situations where the local physical
process and feedback play significant roles, such as urban heat island
effect [29]. It also hinders the modelling of those phenomena which by
their nature often happen within a small spatial scope of few kilometers
or for a quite short time, for instance heavy rainstorm and tropical
cyclone [30]. Against this, current researches generally apply statistical
and dynamical downscaling to convert large-scale climate change
Fig. 2. The overall framework of this article.
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Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews 135 (2021) 110415
modelling into a finer scale.
Statistical downscaling adopts the between-variable empirical rela­
tionship from a historical period to derive future climatic features of the
targeted scale from large-scale GCM outputs. It is relatively easy to
understand and operate but may cause significant biases when long-run
and high-quality observation data are lacking, or when between-
variable relationships nonlinearly vary by condition or by time [31,
32]. Comparatively, dynamical downscaling relies more on physical
laws, which applies the nest of regional climate models (RCMs) with
GCMs to explicitly represent climatic and meteorological processes at
the finer grid. For an urban scale, such downscaling can be conducted by
integrating GCMs with the nested RCMs or specific meteorological
models, such as hurricane model. Although dynamical downscaling can
ensure the physical consistency between large-scale and fine-scale cli­
matic variables, it is computationally expensive and may also yield
biased results. Such biases may inherit from the upper-level driving
GCMs or be caused by the improper transfer of information between
GCMs and RCMs, the misrepresentation of sub-grid physical processes,
as well as the unclear conditions of boundary delimitation [33,34].
Additionally, the methods of statistical and dynamical downscaling
are compared in their practical applications, exhibiting considerable
differences in projection of future climate condition. The empirical ev­
idences demonstrate that how good the performance of each method
would vary by location and by climatic variable, proposing to select
appropriate models based on the local reality. Moreover, the combina­
tion of dynamical and statistical downscaling methods has been
increasingly advocated by recent studies. The combined application can
draw both advantages of capturing the regional-specific climate forcing
and feedbacks and removing the possibly systematic biases of models,
providing a prospective option for future fine-scale study [35,36].
2.2. Calibration and bias correction
Although significant progresses have been achieved, downscaling, by
itself alone, still cannot guarantee a reliable enough conversion from the
B. Ye et al.
large-scale climate change modelling into a local scale. When calibrating
the downscaled climate simulations with historical observations, there
often exhibit significant biases which may be caused by the incomplete
knowledge on climate systems or the simplified spatial averaging within
grid cells [37]. Therefore, to bias-correct the raw climate simulation
results is of great importance to provide the more reliable inputs for
future climate projection and follow-up impact analysis.
Generally, bias correction is built on the comparison between model-
simulated and field-observed climatic variables and can be carried out
by three major steps. To begin with, the simulated climate results are
calibrated with actual observations in a historical baseline period, with
an aim to identify the biases and establish a statistical relationship be­
tween them. Then based on this analysis, the second step makes a bias-
correction of simulated climate results for the historical baseline period,
while the third step proceeds to a future period and yields the bias-
corrected results of future climate projection [38]. Under the above
framework, a wide variety of methods have been developed to reduce
the biases either in GCMs or RCMs results prior to processing or in
locally downscaled results. The most previous researches use the method
of mean adjusting, which assumes no difference in variability between
the simulated and observed sequences and merely correct biases in their
mean values [39]. But in fact, biases in variability are usually a more
prominent issue than that in mean. Hence, variance adjusting has
become a more general approach used for bias-correction, which can
correct the biases in not only mean but also variability of simulated
variables relative to field observations [40].
Remarkably, both of mean and variance adjusting methods perform
not well for the relatively more stochastic variables, such as precipita­
tion and solar radiation. As an illustration, they often show a drizzle
problem featured by too many weak but too few heavy rain events
compared to the observations [41]. Against this, a more sophisticated
approach of quantile mapping has been increasingly applied in recent
researches. This type of approach can individually adjust each quantile
of the simulated or downscaled results to actual observations and hence
performs better to capture both short-spanned variability and extreme
behavior in climate distribution [37,41,42]. Regarding the urban scale,
many state-of-the-art quantile mapping techniques have emerged over
the recent years. They are usually implemented after the downscaling
step and employed to make a further calibration of downscaled climate
and weather information, such as heat wave [13], extreme temperatures
[43], and daily precipitation [44].
2.3. Major progresses and challenges
Overall, the recent developments in downscaling and bias correction
methods have rendered climate change simulations more applicable to
the urban-scale study. However, the practical application of advanced
models or methods remains sometimes trapped by mismatched time­
scales between global/regional and local-scale models. In some cases,
the results obtained after downscaling and bias-correction may still
provide unreliable or even misleading information about the property
and distribution of climatic variables. These misrepresentations not only
result from the inherent defects of GCMs or RCMs, for instance the
simplified parametrization of physical processes [45], and the defective
representation of internally random variability and spatiotemporal dy­
namics in the real world [46]; but also can be attributed to the over­
looking of local climate forcing and feedbacks, such as urban
land-surface forcing and aerosol contributions [47–49]. Hence, the
post-processing of climate change simulation for the local-scale analysis
needs to properly account for the underlying physical processes which
govern the location of interest and should be conducted based on
case-specific merits [47]. Apart from these, the interdependence and
interaction between climate variables, such as temperature and pre­
cipitation, have been increasingly evidenced recently, which will likely
increase the occurrence of compound and extreme climate events [50].
However, the current studies mostly focus on univariate features of
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Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews 135 (2021) 110415
climate variable while rarely involve multivariate analysis. Hence, how
to represent the dependence structure and co-variability between cli­
matic variables and how to perform multivariate cross-calibration and
bias correction need to be further studied and improved in future [31,
51].
3. Research on simulation of urban development and
microclimate
Cities are not only highly exposed to climate change impacts, but also
interact with regional climate forcing to jointly shape their local mi­
croclimates. Although the well-processed RCM results have become
capable of reflecting urban overall climate, they remain unable to pro­
vide detailed information on the microscale climate insides a city.
Therefore, after the downscaling of climate change simulation, the
literature needs to project the possible changes in local climate forcing
factors driven by urban expansion and socioeconomic development, and
then couple these changes with regional climate forcing to simulate the
future microclimate of the studied city. This section will offer a critical
review of how to project future socioeconomic development of a city and
how to couple local and regional climate forcing to simulate urban
microclimate. Noticeably, the projection of urban socioeconomic
development can also help identify urban fields and systems potentially
vulnerable to climate change impact, which will offer important infor­
mation for vulnerability and risk assessment in the next two sections.
The overall framework of this section is illustrated by Fig. 3.
3.1. Projection of urban socioeconomic development
Socioeconomic development is a primary engine for urban expansion
and growth which will in turn drive the change in urban local climate
forcing factors, such as land cover, spatial morphology, aerosol con­
centration, and surface heat flux. Additionally, socioeconomic devel­
opment also serves as a critical pillar to identify and examine the
potential exposure and risk of future urban system to climate change,
such as population, infrastructure, economy, and wealth.
Scenario-based analyses have been commonly used to describe the
possible future of a complicated urban organism. Some scenario studies
focus on one or several specific aspects of a city [13,52], while some
others attempt to draw out urban overall blueprints [53,54]. Addition­
ally, facing with more and more significant impacts of climate change,
many cities have taken active efforts to combat climate change. The
updated researches have increasingly incorporated urban strategy and
action on climate change mitigation and adaptation into scenario
building [55]. Although scenario-based analyses can offer the storyline
and narrative of future urban development, they cannot satisfy the
detailed information demand for quantifying the change in urban local
climate forcing and the impact of climate change on cities. A variety of
input-output (IO) models, computable general equilibrium (CGE)
models and integrated assessment models (IAM), therefore, have been
used to translate narrative scenario into numerical simulation. These
models show advantage of representing various parts of a city and their
interactions with each other by a consistent framework. However, their
applications are largely restrained by the lack of input-output tables or
social accounting matrices at an urban scale [56,57]. Complementarily,
many studies have attempted to make reasonable simplifications of
urban development simulation and concentrate more on one or certain
specific fields. For instance, the system dynamics, non-equilibrium dy­
namics, network, and chemistry-transport models have been exploited,
respectively, to simulate future urban economic growth, infrastructure,
population, as well as urban GHG, pollutants and anthropogenic heat
emissions [58–60].
3.2. Simulation of urban local climate forcing and microclimate
Land cover, spatial morphology, aerosol, and surface heat flux are all
B. Ye et al.
Fig. 3. The overall framework to project future socioeconomic development and microclimate of a city. Contents in the dashed box can provide important infor­
mation for the follow-up vulnerability and risk assessment.
local-scale climate forcing factors in cities, among which land cover and
spatial morphology play particularly important roles. Hence, after the
scenario analysis and simulation of urban development, how various
socioeconomic drivers and neighborhood interactions will jointly
determine the land cover and spatial morphology of a city is another key
link for urban microclimate projection. Currently, the statistical models,
geospatial models and diverse types of their coupled models are the most
well-known methods to perform this work [61,62]. However, without
the adequate consideration of micro behavioural and decision changes,
the credibility of projection from these models might be quite limited for
a long-term future, which is unfortunately a critical time horizon for
climate change studies. To address this, multi-agent models have been
increasingly applied to represent the dynamics of urban microstructure
change [63,64]. A more recent advancement is to couple statistical,
geospatial, or multi-agent models with the newly emerging artificial
intelligence methods, such as artificial neural network and deep
learning. Such practices will significantly improve the capability of
modellers to deal with the high complexity and computational difficulty
of networked urban systems [65,66].
Moreover, given the multiple interplays between urban local and
regional climate forcing, cities are characterized by large variations in
its microclimates across sub-areas, communities, or blocks. For example,
urban center often displays the obviously higher summer temperature
and heavier precipitation than other areas of a city [67]. Against this,
four types of approaches are exploited to move climate change simula­
tions further down to a neighborhood level, which integrate urban local
and regional climate forcing to simulate urban microclimate. The first
type of approach is to couple RCMs with land cover models (LCMs),
which applies post-processed RCMs results as regional climate forcing
and models the future microclimate of a city with particular concerns on
urban land use and land cover change [68,69]. The second type of
approach couples the RCMs with urban canopy models (UCMs),
enabling a more comprehensive consideration of various urban activ­
ities and their impacts on urban local climatic fields [70,71]. These two
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Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews 135 (2021) 110415
types of approaches normally share a common assumption that regional
climate forcing are offline conditions not affected by changes in the city
itself. The third family of approach adopts a different strategy by ac­
counting for city’s interactions with regions and accordingly provides a
more realistic modelling of urban microclimate via online coupling be­
tween LCMs (or UCMs) and RCMs [72]. Recently, the computational
fluid dynamics-based models (CFDMs) has emerged as the fourth type of
promising method. With a fine-resolution representation of urban sur­
face and a better knowledge of related urban flow fields, CFDMs enable
the simulation of urban microclimate at block or even building scales
[73,74].
3.3. Major progresses and challenges
To sum up, the recent advances in method and model have provided
more powerful instruments to simulate the future socioeconomic
development, spatial morphology and microclimate of a city. However,
there remain several challenges to be overcome. The simulation of urban
climate change adaptation should be improved. Most of the current
studies analyse climate change adaptation taken by individual urban
sectors or systems, showing an insufficient integration of adaptive ac­
tions across the entire urban network. Additionally, current planning
and simulation of climate change adaptation are mostly built on a static
framework, without enough considerations of the dynamical process of
climate adaptation and the behaviour change of urban micro-agents
over the long term. Therefore, the integration of climate change adap­
tation across various urban sectors and systems, and the dynamical
upgrading of urban adaptive actions need to be seriously addressed in
future study [75].
Moreover, the interdisciplinary modelling of interactions between
socioeconomic and climatic driving forces should be enhanced for better
estimating urban microclimate change and in turn assessing the poten­
tial risk caused by climate change [76]. Currently, socioeconomic
development planning of a city is typically focused on the horizon of few
B. Ye et al.
decades (for instance 10 or 30 years); whereas climate change modelling
often has either a long-term horizon (such as 50 or 100 years) or quite a
short-term slice (such as hourly or daily). Consequently, the practice of
the interdisciplinary modelling remains trapped by mismatched time­
scales between socioeconomic and climatic modelling of a city.
Furthermore, the high complexity to couple and integrate multiple
models is also a severe challenge. Against these, the future research
should extend and construct urban socioeconomic development plan­
ning towards a coherent timescale with that of climate change model­
ling. A broader understanding of how to exchange information between
urban and regional climate forcing factors and across different aspects of
simulation, is also urgent for improving the microclimate projection of
future city.
4. Research on assessment of urban climate change
vulnerability
The specific impact of climate change on each city depends on not
only the change in local climate this city experiences but also the way it
is exposed to and responds to. Hence, after the projection of urban
microclimate, the following work needs to examine how vulnerable
various sectors and systems of a city are to climate change impacts. The
current literature has widely acknowledged the exposure, sensitivity and
adaptability as three key components that collectively determine
climate change vulnerability of a city [9,77]. However, the traits, in­
dicators and methods used to measure these components as well as the
frameworks used to calculate their resultant vulnerability vary markedly
across researches [78]. Among the wide categories of climate change
impact, the four most serious concerns for urban managers and dwellers
consist of: (1) residential life and health, (2) economy and wealth, (3)
resource availability, and (4) ecosystem and biodiversity. Against this,
this section will make a critical review of recent researches on the
assessment of climate change vulnerability in these four urban systems.
Based on the review analysis, the mainstream modelling chains used to
assess climate change vulnerability are summarized in Fig. 4, with more
Fig. 4. Mainstream modelling chains used by the current literature to examine climate change vulnerability of four urban systems of serious concern.
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Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews 135 (2021) 110415
detailed progresses and challenges discussed as follows.
4.1. Vulnerability of residential life and health
Evidence is mounting that climate change may bring obvious dam­
ages to life and health of urban residents [79]. Many cities around the
world, particularly the megacities and rapidly developing cities, are
confronted with increasing mortality, morbidity, and life loss from
temperature rise [80], air quality deterioration [81] and infectious
disease [82] induced by climate change. The previous studies have
generally formed a classical modelling chain to examines the vulnera­
bility of urban public health to climate change, which consists of four
major parts as showed by Fig. 4 [23,83,84]. The first part makes a
projection of future changes in microclimate and the related changes in
environmental and ecological conditions of a city, with the second part
projects future changes in urban population and demography. Via these
works, the two parts can estimate the exposure of urban population to
climate change. The third part of the modelling chain moves to a sta­
tistical analysis of dose-response relationship between climatic and
health variables, which captures the sensitivity and adaptability of
public health to climate change from epidemiological and toxicological
perspectives. Finally, the fourth part combines the historical
between-variable statistical relationships with future projections on
urban climate and population to estimate the potential impact of climate
change on residential health for a studied period.
With an improved availability of data, recent studies on public health
vulnerability have proceeded from the assessment of urban overall
mortality and morbidity towards more disease-specific details, which
provide the greater guidance for allocating health service resources
[85]. Additionally, the changing structure of urban population and the
interaction between climate change and other stresses occurring with
rapid urbanization have been growingly incorporated into health
vulnerability assessment [7]. For example, some researches examine the
effect of the ongoing inflow of population into megacities and the ageing
of urban population, uncovering that these changes tend to increase the
B. Ye et al.
vulnerability of urban public health to climate change [13,59]. Some
researches explore how warming temperature, heat island effect and air
pollution may interact with each other in future cities, setting off a
warning that the combined effects may bring greater damages to urban
public health [86,87]. However, because of the limited knowledge about
chemistry- or biology-climate interactions, the current modelling of how
climate change affect air quality and living environment of a city and in
turn affect public health remain not sufficiently credible and need to be
further improved [88,89].
4.2. Vulnerability of economy and wealth
Cities are also confronted with increasing economic and wealth
losses from more frequent advents of extreme climate and weather
events, particularly heavy rain, violent storm, flood and wildfire [5,90,
91]. Taking flood as an example, the current literature has facilitated a
computationally tractable monetization of climate change damages to
urban economy and wealth by four major steps [24,92,93], as illustrated
by the second module of Fig. 4. The assessment process begins with the
projection of future changes in flood-related climatic and meteorological
variables for the studied city, such as sea level and precipitation. Then
based on the hydrologic and hydraulic models, geographic information
system (GIS) techniques and urban development planning, the second
step moves to simulate flood frequency and peak discharge and identify
those urban areas, assets and infrastructures highly exposed to flood
risk. The third step introduces damage functions or loss curves that
describe the responses of affected assets or infrastructures to different
degrees of flood, and accordingly, estimates physical and direct mone­
tary losses for the studied city. On this basis, the fourth step further
accounts for intersectoral interactions and examines indirect and sys­
tematic economic losses for the studied city by various types of macro­
economic models, particularly IO, CGE and IAM models.
However, the practical application of the above vulnerability
assessment chain has been questioned because of the linear extrapola­
tion of damage functions or loss curves into future and inadequate
consideration of probably huge changes in urban economic system [94].
To address this, the recent studies have increasingly taken the dynamical
evolution of urban economic system into account, and accordingly,
update the damage function and loss curve for their applications in
future scenarios [95]. Moreover, the defective representation of climate
adaptive action taken by cities is another weak point. With more thor­
ough analysis and more advanced models, recent studies have evaluated
and compared the potential of various types of adaptation measures to
alleviate climate change-induced economic losses [93,96]. The main
results not only confirm the large potential of climate change adaptation
to decrease urban potential economic losses, but also note the signifi­
cantly different effectiveness across alternative measures, proposing to
select climate adaptive measures based on urban features and develop­
ment realities [97,98].
4.3. Vulnerability of resource availability
Driven by the combined effect of climate change and rapid urbani­
zation, many cities are confronted with resource shortage problems. The
deficit of freshwater is one of the most prominent resource challenges to
cities [99]. The current literature examines the vulnerability of urban
freshwater resource to climate change generally by four major steps, as
illustrated by the third module of Fig. 4 [25,100,101]. First, global hy­
drological models are coupled with global climate projections to simu­
late future terrestrial water cycles at the macroscales, which are then
downscaled to the fine-grid availability of freshwater resource for the
urban watershed of interest. The second step projects urban socioeco­
nomic development and integrates it with water-use models to estimate
future freshwater demand in the studied city. On the basis of projected
freshwater availability and demand, the third step moves to estimate the
possible deficit of freshwater resource faced by cities in a future period,
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which reflects the vulnerability of urban freshwater resource to climate
change. Finally, the fourth step accounts for groundwater withdraw and
reexamines the impact of climate change on urban freshwater deficit.
Noticeably, during this process, climate change affects not only the
availability but also the demand of urban freshwater resource [102]. For
example, urban energy demand and in turn cooling water used for power
generation are sensitive to high temperatures, while urban seasonal
water consumption is highly depended on daily temperature and annual
total precipitation, all of which tend to evolve an increasing trend with
climate change [103,104]. Moreover, the impact of climate change on
urban freshwater security is also heavily affected by the development of
a city itself, such as land use, landscape pattern, population growth, and
demand-side management. Against this, an increasing number of recent
studies have investigated the combined effect of climate change and
other socioeconomic development changes on urban freshwater
resource [105].
4.4. Vulnerability of ecosystem and biodiversity
Apart from what are discussed above, it has been widely recognized
that climate change will exacerbate ecosystem degradation and loss in
biodiversity [106]. Current researches have applied many different
methods to examine the vulnerability of species diversity to climate
change, but the basic idea of their assessments can be summarized as the
fourth module of Fig. 4 [26,107,108]. The assessment process is started
from the identification of ecosystems and species that are exposed to and
vulnerable to climate change impacts in the studied city and its perim­
eter zones, particularly those vulnerable species living in vulnerable
urban ecosystems. After this, the second part projects the possible
change in relevant climatic and meteorological conditions for a future
period, while the third part analyzes how such changes will affect
climatically suitable habitat and living condition of vulnerable species
by virtue of species distribution or ecological niche models. Finally, the
fourth part makes an integration of exposure, sensitivity and adapt­
ability analyzed above to examine the impact of climate change on
future species survival and persistence.
Noticeably, the city-scale assessment of biological vulnerability to
climate change has its own unique feature and methodology require­
ment relative to global and regional assessments. As an example, in
addition to climate change, the process of urbanization and the related
anthropogenic activities also significantly affect ecological environment
and biodiversity in cities. To address this, the recent studies have
increasingly accounted for the interactions between climate change and
other urbanization factors, such as land cover change, noise, air pollu­
tion and adaptive actions, and accordingly, explore their combined ef­
fects on urban biodiversity [109]. Moreover, most of previous
researches adopt the projected decline or fragmentation of climatically
suitable habitat to measure the exposure of species to climate change.
However, climate change brings much more complicated shocks to the
survival and livelihood of species. Therefore, more updated researches
have expanded the impact mechanism analysis and pay more attention
to the potential influence on species through channels such as food
availability and round-trip migration [110].
4.5. Major progresses and challenges
To sum up, the recent researches have made significant progresses to
examine the vulnerability of urban residential health, economy and
wealth, resource availability, and biodiversity to climate change,
particularly in terms of capturing the interaction and the combined ef­
fect of climate change and other urbanization stresses and of repre­
senting the potential of various adaptive actions. However, there remain
some deficiencies and challenges to be addressed.
For the assessment of residential health vulnerability, one of the
greatest concerns is that the dose-response relationship between cli­
matic and health variables may change by conditions and timescales
B. Ye et al.
[47]. An expected trend of steadily rising health damages may be dis­
rupted by much more severe or even beyond-threshold climate change
events. How to deal with nonlinear and non-stationarity relationships
between variables is, thus, a serious challenge to be addressed. For the
assessment of urban economic vulnerability, current studies are con­
strained to damages that occur concurrently with climate hazards and
can be felt by the markets. Such a partial scope overlooks a fact that
climate change may affect a city for many subsequent years and may
cause damages to other important but non-market values [111,112],
which deserves more attention in future. As for the assessment of
freshwater resource vulnerability, trans-regional and trans-basin trans­
fer of freshwater resource have quickly increased in cities. Such change
brings additional uncertainties to freshwater resource availability and
vulnerability assessment [25,113], posing another challenge to future
study. For the assessment of ecological vulnerability, current researches
commonly adopt the intrinsic traits of a species to reflect its climate
sensitivity and adaptability. However, such practices still have draw­
backs in inadequate consideration of certain important traits [114],
arbitrariness of trait selection [115], and incomparability across
different taxonomic groups [116]. Therefore, the development of more
scientific and standardized trait system and the improvement of
comparability are two challenges to be overcome.
Furthermore, there are several common challenges confronted by the
assessment of climate change vulnerability in all four urban systems.
First, climatic variables can sometimes interact with each other, and the
compound effect of them may pose greater disturbances to various as­
pects of a future city [20]. As an illustration, high temperature and
drought are generally concurrent in some regions [117]. These com­
pound hot and drought events affect not only the power demand and
load curve but also the operational flexibility and cost of urban energy
systems, particularly those with high proportions of renewable sources
[118]. Therefore, the assessment of urban vulnerability to compound
climate events is a common challenge to be overcome. Second, the in­
dicators and forms of their scoring to measure urban climate change
exposure, sensitivity and adaptability present significant differences and
controversies in current practices, calling for more consensuses on in­
dicator system and more advanced methods on indicator scoring and
weighting [119]. Finally, when aggregating exposure, sensitivity and
adaptability into vulnerability, the future literature faces a challenge to
disentangle the synergism in these three components and get a better
understanding about the critical fields to act to reduce the vulnerability
of an entire city [21].
Fig. 5. An integrated assessment framework of climate change risk to city. Here, H, A, and C indicate climate hazards, affected urban assets and the resultant
consequences, with i, j, k representing their different types and categories, respectively.
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5. Research on integrated assessment of urban climate change
risk
Nearly each step of urban microclimate simulation, socioeconomic
projection and vulnerability assessment faces a lot of uncertainty fac­
tors. On the ground of the above sections, this section emphasizes the
effect of uncertainty and offers a critical review of the recent literature
concerned with how to assess urban damage potentially induced by
climate change under multiple uncertain conditions. Many previous
researchers have attempted to address this issue, but they present sig­
nificant inconsistencies in analytical paradigm and assessment
approach. For instance, some studies focus on uncertainties in climate
hazard assessment [120], some on uncertainties in vulnerability
assessment [121], while others on uncertainties in impact assessment
[122]. However, these three types of practices, given their partial scopes
of uncertainty and mutual isolations, cannot deliver a comprehensive
understanding about how uncertain climate change will affect uncertain
urban system in future. To overcome this, the method of climate change
risk assessment has been increasingly advocated in the recent literature,
which can not only capture the interactions between climate hazard,
vulnerable urban system and resultant consequence but also better deal
with multiple uncertainties surrounding them [15,123]. As illustrated
by Fig. 5, an integrated assessment of climate change risk to city consists
of three main modules, namely risk identification, risk quantification,
and risk synthetic evaluation. Moreover, the assessment is carried out
through a continuous and iterative process, with massive information
exchanges between any two modules [124].
5.1. Identification of climate change risk
The process of climate change risk assessment starts from identifying
the potential climate hazards a city is exposed to, the vulnerable urban
assets (population, economy, resource, ecosystem, etc.), and the con­
sequences that climate hazards may cause in this city for a given time
slice. Risk identification sorts out the hazard-asset-consequence pair
which will be regarded as a basic unit for the follow-up analysis. The
recognition of the currently known concerns about climate change and
the participation of extensive stakeholders are vital to get a preliminary
set of all possible hazard-asset-consequence pairs [125]. After this, the
selection of the critical pairs for more detailed risk evaluation is closely
related with city-specific geographical locations, socioeconomic con­
texts and developing situations, and each city should be examined on a
case-by-case basic [120]. For instance, flood is identified as one of the
most severe climate hazards to human life and infrastructure in New
B. Ye et al.
York and other coastal cities [126], while drought poses the most
dangerous threat to freshwater resource, agricultural production, and
wildfire in dryland cities [127].
In addition, screening out major uncertainties in each of the selected
hazard-asset-consequence pair is another crux in climate change risk
identification [128]. Although the assessment of climate change impact
on a city faces multiple sources of uncertainty, most of previous re­
searches focus on uncertainties in future climate change while rarely
caring about uncertainties in affected urban systems and their vulnera­
bilities [129,130]. However, with the continuous improvement and
upgrading of climate models, urban exposure, adaptability, and
vulnerability play increasingly important roles to determine the ulti­
mate impact of climate change on a future city. Taking drought risk in
Africa as an example, it is estimated that although drought hazard is the
worst in northern African countries, drought risk tends to be the highest
in central African countries owing to their growing population and so­
cioeconomic vulnerability [131]. Hence, recent studies have put more
attention to explore uncertainties and their interdependences in socio­
economic development and climate change adaptation of the city, which
help to facilitate a more systematic identification of multiple related
uncertainties [132,133].
5.2. Quantification of climate change risk
After identifying a critical hazard-asset-consequence pair, risk
assessment moves to quantify the uncertain effect of uncertain climate
hazard on an uncertain urban future. To perform this, current researches
firstly adopt the probability density functions (PDFs) to describe major
uncertainties in urban climate change, socioeconomic development and
vulnerability, and model how these uncertainties in input can be prop­
agated to the uncertainties in urban damages. Next, the literature will
determine a critical threshold of climate condition (which, if being
triggered, will lead to abrupt change or irreversible consequence), and
hereby calculate the probability of exceeding this threshold and the
associated expected loss. This is called as the threshold-exceedance
probability method, which is applicable to quantify urban risks from
gradually changing climate events; for instance, public health risk and
ecological degradation risk from climatic disturbances [134,135].
Noticeably, multiple uncertainties are usually not independent each
other. The phenomena of urban risks being aggravated by compound
climate events have been frequently observed nowadays [136,137]. To
address this, joint PDFs and copula-based probability models have been
increasingly employed by the recent researches to capture the depen­
dence structure between interrelated variables, which advance the
simulation of compound climate events [117,138].
In addition to gradually changing events, cities suffer from more
frequent attacks of extreme climate and weather events, and concomi­
tantly, increasing catastrophic risks. How to quantify urban risks from
climate and weather extremes poses a new challenge. As an illustration,
an occurrence of an extreme rainstorm implies that most of the related
uncertainties concurrently deliver an ensemble of the worst case. Thus,
the second type of risk quantification aims at climate catastrophes which
have very low probabilities of occurrence but may trigger extremely
disastrous consequences. In this case, the ability to capture the tail
behaviour of uncertain variables is vitally important [139]. The early
literature mostly applies Generalized Extreme Value models to facilitate
the estimation of the potential impact of extreme climate event on a city
[140]. Recently, an increasing number of studies have endeavoured to
introduce more advanced techniques to enhance the estimation of dis­
tribution parameters of uncertain variables, such as Markov Chain, and
Markov Chain Monte Carlo [141,142]. By further accounting for the
time-varying and jumping features of uncertainty, this progress gets
closer to the actual behaviour of climate extreme and helps to facilitate a
more realistic quantification of urban climate catastrophic risks.
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5.3. Synthetic evaluation of climate change risk
After risk identification and quantification, the third step forges
ahead to provide a user-friendly synthetic evaluation of climate change
risk for city. Here, the results of risk quantification will be compared
with evaluation criteria to clarify risk grades and then deliver the
determined outcomes to target users, which involve three key elements
of risk evaluation criteria, risk rating and form of risk expression. Ac­
cording to different evaluation targets and objects, the synthetic eval­
uation of climate change risk can be classified into three major
categories. One category focuses on a specific climate threat a city is
exposed to, for instance a synthetic evaluation of flood risk to various
assets of a coastal city. Taking climate change induced flood as an
illustration, many researches firstly identify the major urban assets
vulnerable to flood hazard, such as residential life and health, economic
production, and infrastructure. On this basis, various probability-
casualty or probability-loss curves are separately applied to count the
expected loss in each of individual urban assets, which are then syn­
thesized to determine the synthetic flood risk for a studied city [94,143].
Notably, spatially explicit data and GIS technique gain more and more
applications in recent several years, which contributes to creating a
visualized climate change risk map for the studied city [144,145].
Taking Venice, Italy as an example, the score of climate hazard,
vulnerability and risk has been individually calculated for every urban
grid and broken into different risk grades; and then, a flood risk map is
produced for the Venice city based on risk score and risk grade of each
urban grid and ArcGIS [146].
The other category of research focuses on a specific urban system
being extremely vulnerable to climate change, such as the synthetic
evaluation of urban energy system risk from all possible climate threats.
Taking urban electricity system as an illustration, the studies identify the
major climate hazards this system exposes to and individually detect the
risk possibly induced by each of these hazards, such as warming tem­
perature, declining water availability, and increasing climate and
weather extremes. Afterwards, the result of individual evaluation for all
identified climate hazards will be synthesized to determine the overall
climate change risk faced by urban electricity system [147,148]. In this
process, warming temperature and declining water availability may
bring urban electricity system increasing power demand while
decreasing supply capacity, causing the operational risk of increasing
production cost, system instability or blackout [149]. Extreme climate
and weather may pose the increasing damage to electric infrastructure,
leading to the substantial risk of escalating maintenance and recon­
struction expenditure [150,151]. It is noteworthy that two issues have
gained growing attention in last several years. Renewable energies that
are closely related with climate conditions, will take an increasing
proportion in electricity system. Hence, the recent literature concerns
more about how climate change will affect the operation of decarbon­
ized electricity systems with the high penetration of renewable sources
[152,153]. Moreover, the disruption of urban electricity system may
trigger cascading damages to other systems it serves, and consequently
lead to secondary risks. The recent development of integrated simula­
tion models largely improves the capacity to capture the relevance and
interaction between various urban systems, which helps extend the
scope of evaluation to cover secondary risks [154,155].
Another category of study covers all types of climate change related
threats to all aspects of a city [156], offering a synthetic evaluation of
all-round climate change risks faced by a city. Noticeably, given the
complicated interactions and interdependencies between climate and
human systems, a fully integrated evaluation is impractical while some
reasonable simplifications are necessary [157]. According to this prin­
ciple, the current literature focuses on the impact of primary climate
hazards on major vulnerable systems of a city. After the determination of
major hazards and vulnerable systems, two configurations are mostly
applied to perform the all-round evaluation of urban climate change
risk. The first type of configuration starts from a synthetic evaluation of
B. Ye et al.
climate change hazard and vulnerability. Then, multiple hazards and
multiple vulnerabilities are aggregated into the overall hazard and
overall vulnerability indexes respectively, which are in turn synthesized
to determine the overall index and grade of climate change risk for the
studied city [158]. Such practice is derived from traditional natural
disaster risk assessments and hence is relatively easy to implement.
However, the separation of vulnerability from its paired threat has been
criticized for lacking the scientific basis [156,159]. The second config­
uration begins with the separate evaluation of risk caused by each
climate hazard, and then, weights all individual risks to calculate the
overall risk index and grade or draw a risk map for the studied city [124,
160]. Comparatively, it makes advancement to account for
hazard-vulnerability interactions. Moreover, some climate hazards
happen concomitantly or in succession, which may bring more severe
consequences to the affected city. This issue has gained more attention
in recent studies, with efforts to explore the relevance of different types
of climate hazards and examine their integrated or accumulated dam­
ages to future cities [161,162].
5.4. Major progresses and challenges
In general, the recent studies have achieved significant progresses in
the integrated assessment of climate change risk to city, for instance the
more systematic identification of uncertainties, the improved repre­
sentation of tail behaviours of uncertain variables, the increased
consideration of relevance and interactions between climate hazards
and between climate and human systems, as well as the application of
spatially explicit data for more precise assessment. However, there
remain some challenges to be conquered.
First, it is extremely difficult to develop a mathematical model that
can explicitly represent the process of uncertainty propagation in case of
wide uncertainties and their interdependences. Thus, how to couple
uncertainty propagation analysis with numerical modelling or artificial
intelligence should be addressed to enhance risk quantification [163,
164]. Second, the evaluation scope of current studies is mostly confined
to human casualty and economic loss while overlooking some other
important assets for the city [144,165], advocating for more attention to
historical heritage, cultural value, and social welfare. Third, when
making the synthetic evaluation of climate change risk faced by a city,
the aggregation of multiple types of hazards, vulnerabilities or risks all
remain the emergent and subjective practices. The relative importance
of different types of climate hazard and vulnerability indexes vary
considerably by city. More context-specific index weighting and risk
rating are, therefore, needed for a synthetic evaluation of the overall
climate hazard and vulnerability. Additionally, owing to the different
features of climate hazards and their different spheres of impacts, the
synthesis of multiple climate change risks still has many problems to be
resolve, particularly the objective and comparable index and metric
systems on the urban-scale climate change risk assessment, the more
integrative approaches to standardize and normalize different types of
climate change risks faced by various urban systems, and the formal
evaluation procedures with broad stakeholder participation [144,156].
Finally, transmission and spillover across climate change risks are
widespread and may increase urban overall risk [166,167]. Regrettably,
this issue has not gained adequate consideration and urgently needs
further exploration.
6. Prospects for future research
Despite some progresses have been achieved in the recent literature,
an accurate quantitative assessment of city-specific climate change risk
remains highly challenging. To satisfy the practical need for facilitating
more effective climate change adaption in cities, this article advocates
future research along four important strands to (1) improve study
methodology, (2) enrich knowledge of climate change impact on future
city, (3) enhance accessibility to data and information, and (4) explore
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Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews 135 (2021) 110415
city-specific climate risk service.
6.1. Improvements in study methodology
Many methods and models have been employed to downscale large-
scale climate change simulation into a local scale, to simulate future
socioeconomic development and microclimate of a city, to examine the
vulnerability of various urban systems to climate change, and to make
an integrated assessment of city-specific climate change risk. Table 1
summarizes the major methods and models in the current literature,
together with the discussions on pros and cons of their applications.
Moreover, in despite of significant progresses, different parts of methods
in the urban-scale climate change risk assessment chain need different
improvements to enhance their performances. Several suggested im­
provements to study methodology are presented from left to right, in the
Fig. 6. These suggestions are not meant to be exhaustive but rather
intend to deliver some examples for future improvement directions.
To begin, the current practice of downscaling and bias correction
displays limited abilities to enhance the credibility of local-scale climate
change projections for the city, and may even deliver false signals [30,
31,47]. To get more credible information on the spatiotemporal varia­
tion in climatic variable, the future literature needs to explore more
advanced approaches on physical-statistical combined downscaling,
stochastic quantile mapping, and multivariate bias correction. Addi­
tionally, a better coupling of urban local with regional climate forcing
are vital to improve the microclimate projection of a city [53,70,86]. On
one hand, urban planning and design should extend their time horizons
to that can be associated with climate change studies. On the other hand,
the simulation of future urban socioeconomic development should take
both Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) and city-specific scenarios
as co-driving forces, with special attention on climate change mitigation
and adaptation, spatial morphology, aerosol concentration, and local
climate zone of the city. Additionally, a seamless online coupling of
regional and urban climate forcing deserves ongoing exploration. As
urban microclimate is not only driven by regional climate but also reacts
to it, LCMs, UCMs or CFDMs should be bidirectionally activated between
urban-scale and mesoscale modelling for properly reproducing the in­
teractions between urban and regional typical features. Such online
coupling is strongly suggested for cities surrounded by complex terrains
or affected by distinctive regional climatic dynamics, such as coastal or
valley cities.
In the realm of estimating urban climate change vulnerability, the
construction of credible between-variable relational function is a chal­
lenge that needs to be addressed. The common practice of extrapolating
historical statistical relationships into the future has been increasingly
questioned, as such relationships are often nonlinear and vary by time
and condition [88,168]. Therefore, it is suggested to identify the critical
thresholds at which between-variable relationships may shift abruptly
and explore the tailor-made forms of relational functions for various
climate-vulnerable urban fields. Additionally, how a city adapts itself to
a changing climate notably affects its vulnerability. Improving extant
approaches and introducing new approaches, such as relational function
shifting and analogue city, are important directions to incorporate urban
acclimatization into the vulnerability analysis. Moreover, the scope of
urban climate change impact assessment is mostly confined to resident
health and direct economic loss, while omitting potential damages to
human well-beings as well as indirect or non-market values [165,169].
This paper advocates delineating the scope and hierarchy of vulnera­
bility assessment, which cover all potentially affected urban functions
and proceed from direct, immediate and market impacts to indirect,
long-lasting and non-market impacts. Accompanying this, another
worthy endeavour is to develop a globally unified unit of accounting,
such as the Social Cost of Carbon. Such work can convert different as­
pects of climate change vulnerability into a uniform metric, and thereby,
enable an examination of urban overall vulnerability and facilitate the
intercity comparison.
B. Ye et al. Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews 135 (2021) 110415

Table 1 Table 1 (continued )

Major methods and models on urban-scale climate change risk assessment in the Category of Study method or Advantage Disadvantage
current literature. study model
Category of Study method or Advantage Disadvantage computational offering the more coupling of urban
study model fluid dynamics- realistic modelling local models and
Downscaling of Statistical Relatively easy to Requiring high- based models with of urban regional models
large-scale downscaling understand and quality observation regional climate microclimate
climate operate, data, possible biases models
change to a numerous in case of nonlinear Assessment of Statistical Commonly used Limited ability to
local scale available methods or dynamical urban modelling of dose- and widely deal with nonlinear
and flexible forms statistical climate response accepted and non-stationarity
relationship change relationship statistical methods relationships
Dynamical Physical Computationally vulnerability in climate-health between climatic
downscaling consistency expensive, possible impact assessment and health variables
between large- biases inherited damage functions, Multiple types of Constrained to
scale and local from upper-level loss curves methods and damages that occur
climatic variables models or caused by models, concurrently with
multiple other commonly used to climate hazards,
reasons reflect the neglecting the
Dynamical- Draw advantages Requiring both the relationship possible damages to
statistical of both statistical ability to represent between affected other important but
integrated and dynamical physical processes assets to different non-market values
downscaling methods, perform and the reliable degrees of hazards
well to capture tail observation data Hydrological Strong ability to Limited ability to
distribution models, water-use simulate account for the
Mean and Relatively easy to Poor performance in models terrestrial water human-induced
variance adjusting operate, without the case of more cycles, widely trans-regional and
the information stochastic climatic used models in trans-basin transfers
need of variables climate-water of water resource
probability impact assessment
distribution species Widely used Inadequate
function distribution models to considerations of
Quantile mapping Perform well to Needing high- models, ecological investigate the unique feature of
match all quality data to build niche models climate change city-scale
statistical probability impacts on species assessment, and the
moments and distribution distribution and impacts of other
capture short- function, poor biodiversity urbanization
spanned performance to stresses
variability and capture internal Integrated Probability Multiple types of Difficulty to develop
extreme behavior variability and assessment of density functions, available models, mathematical
of climatic temporal trend of urban probability widely used models in case of
variables climatic variables climate models methods to multiple
Simulation of Scenario-based Offering detailed Lack of input-output change risk simulate interrelated
urban numerical information on all tables or social uncertainty uncertain variables
development simulation, input- possible futures of accounting matrices propagation
and output, a city, at an urban scale Generalized Strong ability to High computational
microclimate computable representing extreme value capture the tail difficulty in extreme
general various systems models behavior and value distribution
equilibrium, and their feature of and parameter
integrated interactions by a uncertain estimation
assessment consistent variables
models framework Probability- Widely used Confined to human
System dynamics, Making Limited to one or casualty curves, methods to casualty and
non-equilibrium reasonable certain specific probability-loss estimate the economic loss,
dynamics, simplifications of fields, cannot reflect curves expected casualty overlooking some
network, a complicated the overall or economic loss other important
chemistry- urban organism, development under uncertain assets to a city
transport models relatively easy to blueprint of a city conditions
operate Index weighting, Various types of Lack of objective
Statistical models, The most well- Without enough risk rating, GIS- available methods and comparable
geospatial models known methods to considerations of based spatial to integrate index systems,
and diverse types simulate land possible changes in overlaying multiple types of context-specific
of their coupled cover and spatial microstructure and climate change weighting and risk
models morphology of a micro-agent risks into urban rating methods, and
city behaviors over the overall risks more standardized
long run methods in risk
Offline coupling Numerous Unable to reflect the integration
of land cover, available methods mutual interactions
urban canopy, and models, between urban and
computational relatively low regional climate Furthermore, how to represent multiple uncertainties and their in­
fluid dynamics- computational forcing terdependences remains a conundrum for risk quantification. The study
based models with difficulty in advocates to address this issue from two aspects. On one side, the ca­
regional climate multiple-model
models coupling
pacity of modelling interrelated climatic variables should be largely
Online coupling of Accounting for High computational enhanced for examining the compound climate events, which trigger
land cover, urban city’s interactions complexity to make climate catastrophes [166,167]. The future literature on climate hazard
canopy, with regions, online bidirectional simulation needs to advance the methods for reproducing an ensemble
of interrelated climatic variables and incorporating their relevance into

11
B. Ye et al.
Fig. 6. State-of-the-art progresses and future potential improvements in study methodology on urban-scale climate change risk assessment.
hazard probability counting. On the other side, the study advocates the
more flexible coupling of advanced uncertainty quantification tech­
niques, such as multi-agent, random numerical simulation and artificial
intelligence, which will offer the computationally feasible solution to
represent realistic and complex uncertain issues [141,164]. Addition­
ally, how to deliver a reliable integrated assessment of urban climate
change risk in intuitive and user-friendly ways is another big challenge
[146,160]. A suite of globally standardized index and metric systems
coupled with the multidisciplinary analytical framework need to be
established, which help scientifically synthetize different types of
climate change risks into an overall risk. Furthermore, the current risk
assessments generally adhere to a stationary framework. However, this
has been repeatedly questioned by the growing occurrence probability
of climate extremes and their time-varying attributes. Therefore, the
article advocates upgrading the static framework to a dynamic one and
developing new time-varying assessment approaches, which can better
capture the evolution of urban risk with dynamical climate change and
urbanization processes.
6.2. Enriching knowledge of climate change impact on city
The quantitative assessment of urban climate change risk is woefully
hindered by the currently limited and compartmentalized knowledges
on future climate change and urban response [15]. To feed the emerging
intellectual hunger, this article advocates bridging the gaps between a
variety of related disciplines and study fields to reassemble existing
knowledge reserves. Moreover, all involved scholars and stakeholders
should make the concerted efforts to develop a rigorous urban-scale
climate risk science, which requires knowledge enrichment in five pri­
ority areas: (1) coupling of climate modelling at global-, regional- and
urban scales; (2) compound climate event; (3) feedback loop between
climate change, urban adaptation and climate change risk; (4) critical
threshold of vulnerability in various urban systems; and (5) transmission
mechanism of climate change risk inside a city or across cities.
First, climate modellers from global, regional and urban dimensions
need stronger communication and collaboration, and through these ef­
forts, they will be able to present greater scientific clarity about the
processes of how global- and regional-scale climate change will drive
local-scale climate change of a city, how urbanization and its relevant
features will contribute to regional and local climates, and how regional
and urban local climate forcing will collectively determine the micro­
climate of a city. Second, urban risks from compound climate events
have been increasingly observed around the world, but our under­
standing of this topic has seriously lagged behind [166]. Another
pressing need is, therefore, to expand the knowledges of how underlying
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Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews 135 (2021) 110415
climate processes and their interactions can shape compound climate
threats. Third, significant socioeconomic changes and emerging initia­
tives to combat climate change are expected for future cities, and such
changes may substantially alter urban vulnerability [43,163]. As an
example, a city has now predicted that the risk to experience extreme
climate events will increase, and accordingly it takes efforts to
strengthen urban infrastructures, which may in turn alleviate climate
change risk. Considering this, the future literature needs to deepen the
understanding of the changing nature of city itself, and to build the
complete knowledge system for resolving the feedback loops between
climate change, urban adaptive actions, and dynamics of urban climate
change risk.
The fourth priority is to improve the knowledges regarding the
critical thresholds of climate change vulnerability in various urban
systems. Demographic change is one widely expected trend in cities,
which will alter residential vulnerability to heat stress [170]. The
identification of group-specific vulnerability threshold is thus important
for climate-health vulnerability analysis. Additionally, the tipping point
of climate change-induced freshwater shortage in cities needs deeper
exploration, with research to identify the major factors affecting urban
freshwater availability and demand under a changing climate, and to
elucidate the interactions between urban, watershed and regional water
cycles [15,102]. Moreover, the current climate science is barely able to
determine the threshold of climate change beyond which a city will be
placed at huge systemic risks. A better comprehending of how multiple
climate tipping points interact with each other and how they may
collectively trigger a climate catastrophic risk to future city are eager for
further study.
The fifth priority is to build a complete scientific system concerning
the influence mechanism of climate change on cities, and the trans­
mission mechanism of climate risk inside or across cities. Changes in
global, regional and local climates can affect a city via multiple manners
directly or indirectly, immediately or tardily, solo or as multiplier [17,
112]. Direct and immediate influence mechanisms are currently the
major focus of public concern. Comparatively, indirect, and delayed
influence mechanisms gain much less attention; for instance, the influ­
ence channel that leads from a climate extreme to disastrous asset losses
and then to irrecoverable human capital damages and long-term pov­
erties. Additionally, climate change does not act alone, but as a multi­
plier with other urbanization stressors, such as air pollution and slums.
An extensive involvement of natural and social scientists, policy makers
and other stakeholders, therefore, is vital for making a well-rounded
assessment of climate change impacts and for facilitating a co-design
of important study questions. Moreover, city is a highly networked
and dynamic system which is both affecting regional and global contexts
B. Ye et al.
and affected by them [171]. Hence, additional knowledge is required to
understand the cascading effect of climate shocks across various systems
and functions of a city, and to understand the two-way spillover of
climate change risks between a city and its surrounding regions, which
will help estimate the secondary, social, and diffuse risks.
6.3. Enhancing abundance and accessibility to data
To perform a quantitative assessment of urban-scale climate change
risk, the future study requires an enhancement of data availability and
quality, and an advancement of information integration and sharing
across various parties involved.
Previous climate change studies mostly concentrate on global and
regional levels, resulting in a large gap at the urban level. Data on urban-
scale climate forcing are rarely available or even non-existent. Hence, it
is crucial to compile the urban-scale inventory of GHG emissions.
Emission inventories of other climate-forcing air pollutants are also
needed—particularly ozone, aerosol and black carbon [61]. Urban au­
thorities should establish a set of official systems to periodically take
stock of GHG and other climate-forcing pollutant emissions, together
with the standardized procedure and the unified accounting framework
to verify these inventories and ensure their consistency across time.
Fine-grid urban spatial data are also limited [15,65]. Advanced remote
sensing technologies should be increasingly employed to monitor the
real-time change in dense urban fabrics and enable the access to
high-quality spatial data. These data can then be coupled with wide
sources of urban planning data in the GIS-based analysis platforms,
which provide supports for simulating future microclimate and drawing
climate change vulnerability and risk map of the city.
A credible integrated assessment of climate change risk needs high-
quality data on wide-ranging impacts potentially caused by climate
change on complex urban networks. This requirement has currently not
got satisfied [22]. Regarding climate-health impact assessments, this
study proposes to refine existing data and expand future observations on
dose-response relationship, and develop more age-, income-, or
disease-specific data subsets on health impacts [84,85]. Regarding
climate-economy impact assessments, the currently available data are
rarely derived by a consistent manner in either data source, data pro­
cessing or data calculation, rendering the comparability of economic
loss across studies or cities a daunting task [15,172]. Against this,
further work should guarantee the consistency in the scope, type, and
statistic calibre of data collection, as well as the normalization of data
processing and calculation—particularly the scope of direct and indirect
economic losses and the discounting of future losses into current dollars.
For climate-biodiversity impact assessments, given the dual stresses
from climate change and rapid urbanization, the future study needs to
develop databases which help identify the vulnerable ecosystems and
species in different types of cities, coupled with the city-tailored data on
ecological thresholds [135].
With an increasing abundance of data, making the best use of these
resources is of equal importance. Even if they become available, data
and their embedded information are widely dispersed across diverse
agencies and sources. Consequently, it remains very difficult to get a
complete dataset required for citywide climate change risk assessment.
The development of web-based platforms, which can facilitate infor­
mation integration and sharing and hereby enable user’s discovery and
access to entire information sets, is a pivotal need [173]. Such platforms
should contain both the monitoring data gathered from related statis­
tical agencies and the extrapolated or simulated data produced based on
the metadata, narrative storylines, and state-of-the-art modelling tools.
Importantly, these data should adhere rigorously to the agreed-upon
standards of interoperability and compatibility in data collection, pro­
cessing and use. Furthermore, several analogous platforms have been
assembled at national, regional or basin levels, such as the Climate Data
API developed by World Bank. Urban-scale platforms can link to these
platforms for accessing the upper-level resources, and they can also
13
Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews 135 (2021) 110415
complement them to produce finer-resolution, higher-frequency, and
more real-time data and information.
6.4. Exploring the best practice for city-specific climate risk service
How to translate science, knowledge, data, and information into the
on-the-ground climate change adaptation raises general concern [174].
This translation poses a tough challenge to conduct climate change risk
management at an urban scale, which involves a wide range of scientific
disciplines and requires a lot of evidences from many related domains. A
well-rounded, unbiased, and transparent synthesis of available sciences
and evidences about climate change, city, as well as climate change
impact on city is hence a pressing concern [175]. A joint task force
composed of extensive stakeholders should be assembled to enable full
discussions and debates on all potentially related disciplines and evi­
dences. This can guarantee the synthesis as systematic and objective as
possible and help identify the places where emerging sciences or evi­
dences may refresh current synthesis. Future research also needs to
acknowledge and explicitly describe limitations and uncertainties in
current synthesis practices, which will make the synthesized results
more reliable, robust, and useful for audiences.
As manifested by the inadequate exploitation of data and informa­
tion and by the failure to meet user demands, there remains a significant
gap between climate science and practice. To narrow this gap, the
development of customized climate risk service, which translate avail­
able climate science into easy-to-understand information and easy-to-
use instruments for climate-informed decision making, is a vital need
[176]. Global Framework for Climate Services (GFCS) is presently a
leading international initiative on production and supply of
science-based climate services, which helps different types of user
communities to alleviate potential losses from current climate change
and build resilience to future climate change [177]. However, GFCS
focuses primarily on global, regional and national scales, while rarely
outreaching to an urban scale. The large scope inherent in that frame­
work cannot satisfy the demand of climate risk management from cities.
Hence, the exploration of customized climate risk services for diversified
users at an urban scale is advocated by this article, as presented in Fig. 7.
Urban-scale climate risk service can start from climate-sensitive
sectors, such as residential health, energy, freshwater, and emergency
management sectors, and should tailor to the personalized demand of
customer. A variety of user-friendly interfaces and easy-to-use products
on climate risk management are strongly proposed to be developed for
different types of user communities [178]. For scholars and researchers,
climate risk service should commit to enabling the interoperable access
to related data/information, the standardized interface to upload and
download heterogeneous resources, and the easily operated product for
multi-model coupling. For urban planners and managers, such service
should focus on informing the possible range of climate change impacts
and offering science- and trust-based information to assist planning and
policymaking [179]. For business operators and residents, a series of
portals, apps or dashboards that can provide intuitive presentations of
information and be easily embedded in computers or mobile devices,
deserve a quick development. As non-expert users often have limited
science capacities and merely care about certain specific issues, these
highly readable products will deliver them more workable information
and help them better respond to climate change.
Furthermore, the developers of climate risk service must closely
interact with their data providers and users to regularly update and
upgrade services [180]. The developers need to regularly absorb new
knowledges from related disciplines and research fields, as well as new
data and information from multiple stakeholders. Just as important,
they also require frequent interactions with customers to master the
latest service demands. By these efforts, the timeliness, quality, and
applicability of climate risk service will be continuously improved to
meet the newly emerging demands. Additionally, it is equally important
to introduce proper case-study products. The assessment and
B. Ye et al.
Fig. 7. Urban-scale customized climate risk services for various types of users.
management of climate change risk has become one of the mainstream
actions taken to combat climate change in many European countries and
cities. However, such initiative is not as widely applied in cities of
developing and least-developed countries, which are woefully the most
vulnerable places to climate change. Developers of climate risk service
for such cities are recommended to select a set of analogous cities as
their reference samples and develop case-study products. Via these
products, users can learn about how other cities handle the similar
problems and benefit from good international practices.
7. Conclusions and limitations
In view of the increasingly significant and far-reaching impact of
climate change, adaptation to climate change has become as important
as climate change mitigation for numerous cities. Quantifying and
assessing the risk possibly induced by climate change has great signifi­
cance for the city to take pro-active climate adaptive actions, and hence,
gains increasing attention in recent years. This study makes a critical
literature review of recent researches concerned with the quantitative
assessment of climate change risk at an urban scale. It is discovered that
the current literature can be basically divided into four major categories
of research respectively on the downscaling of large-scale climate
change to a local scale, simulation of urban development and micro­
climate, assessment of urban climate change vulnerability, and the in­
tegrated assessment of urban climate change risk. These four categories
of research constitute a stepwise modelling chain that moves from global
climate change towards urban-scale risk assessment, providing city-
oriented practical guidelines on climate change risk assessment. More­
over, some significant progresses have been reached during the past
decade, such as the approaches, models and practices to conduct the
downscaling and bias correction of climate change simulation, to project
the future socioeconomic development, local climate forcing and
microclimate of city, to examine the vulnerability of four key urban
systems to climate change, and to identify, quantify and make a syn­
thetic evaluation of climate change risk to city with multiple un­
certainties. These advancements have rendered the quantitative
assessment of climate change risk more viable at the urban scale.
However, there remains many deficiencies and challenges in the
current literature. First, the timescales between mesoscale and urban-
scale models and between climatic and socioeconomic models are mis­
matched in many cases, which traps the coupling of models at different
14
Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews 135 (2021) 110415
scales and the interdisciplinary modelling of climate change impact on
city. Second, the current practices show inadequate capacities to
represent nonlinear and non-stationarity relationships between vari­
ables, to disentangle synergies between urban climate change exposure,
sensitivity and adaptability, to convert different aspects of urban
vulnerability into a unified metric, and to capture complicated and
interrelated uncertainties in urban climate and socioeconomic systems,
posing serious challenges to the assessment of urban-scale climate
change risk. Third, climatic variables sometimes interact with each
other, calling for the better reproduction of compound climate events.
Four, current assessments of climate change risk are mostly constrained
to damages that occur concurrently with climate hazards and can be felt
by markets, facing a challenge to incorporate long-lasting and non-
market impacts into assessment scope. Fifth, the aggregation of multi­
ple types of hazards, vulnerabilities or risks remain emergent and sub­
jective practices, calling for more standardized procedure, objective and
comparable metric system, and advanced approaches to synthesize
different types of climate change risks faced by various systems of a city.
Finally, the transmission and spillover across climate change risks have
been increasingly evidenced, posing another challenge to explicitly
represent the mechanism of risk transmission insides or beyond city.
Against these, this article advocates to advance future research from
four important directions consisting of improving study methodology,
enriching knowledge of climate change impact on city, enhancing
abundance and accessibility to data, and exploring the best practice for
city-specific climate risk service.
The article still has some limitations that need to be further
improved. This article makes a systematic review of recent researches
related with urban-scale climate change risk assessment and classifies
them into four major categories. However, we do not dig deep enough
into each specific category, which should be improved in our future
work. Additionally, this article makes a universal analysis of climate
change risk assessment for cities while not distinguishes different types
of cities, which in fact have remarkably different features of urban
exposure and vulnerability to climate change risk. In the next study, we
will zoom into several typical types of cities such as the megacities, low-
lying coastal cities and poverty-stricken cities, and make more effort to
specify the type-based framework and guideline to identify, quantify
and assess climate change risks for cities. Furthermore, high un­
certainties and interdependences in climatic and socioeconomic vari­
ables have been addressed in this study but not get much detailed
B. Ye et al.
analysis. Against this, we will put further effort to carry out the thematic
research on the catastrophic risk from compound and extreme climate
events. Beyond the above points, the article does not involve the pre­
vention and management of climate change risk in cities, which plays a
great role to minimize potential losses. We will extend future study to
this field, with more attention to collect and evaluate good practices
from global cities and establish a case base for mutual learning between
cities.
Declaration of competing interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial
interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence
the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the National Key R & D Program of China
(2018YFE0206200), National Natural Science Foundation of China
(71803074), and Science and Technology Planning Project of Shenzhen
City (JCYJ20190806144415100 and JCYJ20190809162809440). This
work also thanks the permission of UN-Habitat to uses one of their
copyrighted images.
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